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Beginners’ French: A trip to Avignon

Section 2.9

2.9.1 Looking at a plan

You will be looking at a plan of the museum in order to find your way around.

Key Learning Points

Understanding directions in a building

Understanding what is or is not allowed

Making liaisons with words beginning with ‘h’

Activité 44

Look at the plan of the museum. List the words that you know or can guess the meaning of.

Vous reconnaissez des mots? Faites une liste.

Answer

The words and phrases you recognised probably include: salle de classe, temporaires, toilettes, handicapés, distributeur, souvenirs, téléphone, cafétéria. You could now check the words that you didn't recognise in your dictionary.

Words that are similar in English and French

Sometimes words look alike in French and English, though they may be pronounced differently, for example commonly used words such a cafétéria, toilettes, restaurant, souvenirs. Some words assume different meanings in the two languages over time. Their surface resemblance becomes misleading. These are called faux amis (or false friends)

terrible can mean ‘terrible’ but can also mean ‘terrific’

formidable fabulous, fantastic, great!

une allée a driveway, a tree-lined avenue

un car a coach

le conducteur the driver

Such similarities may help you decipher the meaning of a word, but must be treated with care. You could start a list of them, annotated as above.

Some borrowings from English are derogatorily referred to as franglais. They can be quite easy to understand (for example crasher to crash (computers or aeroplanes); le parking the car park; le camping the campsite), but some are faux amis: un smoking is a dinner jacket, and un sweat (pronounced ‘sweet’) is a sweatshirt!

Vocabulaire

en haut

upstairs

Activité 45

At the entrance to the museum a robot answers queries from tourists. However, it is not functioning correctly. Listen to Extract 67 while looking at the plan of the museum and complete the table.

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